The Day Gone By Page 35
You might have thought that these hungry, diseased, begrimed, unwashed men could hardly be either religious or respectable: you would be wrong. It was impressive to see them turn with dignity towards Mecca and pray, standing upright with folded arms and intermittently prostrating themselves, and then kneeling with foreheads to the ground for a few seconds before rising again. They fasted - fasted! - too, if you can believe it. During Ramadan - a period of a lunar month - they ate and drank nothing from sunrise till sunset, and did a full day’s work into the bargain, though plainly the sides of nature could hardly bear it. Incidentally, they also refrained from sex during that whole month. They were, if you like, devout. Talk to one, and you soon found yourself respecting him as man to man. Our soldiers treated them, as a matter of course, with insults and contempt, frequently calling them ‘wog bastards’ and the like to their faces. I used to do my best to stop this, but the soldiers’ dislike, contempt and lack of any least desire to understand Arabs made it impossible.
The camp was always open to raids by pie-ards, the feral dogs of the plain. (No Arab will touch a dog, let alone keep one.) They are ‘unclean’; wild scavengers, wily, wary and vigilant. They would come to the swill-bins by night, in packs of as many as ten or twelve. They could knock a bin over and get the lid off, no matter what we had done to make it impossible. My mental picture of a pie-ard, though they came all sorts, is of a big, white, fluffy animal rather like a chow. By day they usually came singly, day being much more dangerous for them. I took to shooting them with an ordinary Lee-Enfield rifle loaded with .303: I kept it in my office. Sooner or later an Arab would come dashing in with a cry of ‘Fe kelp, sidi, fe kelp!’ (‘There’s a dog, sir!’) and I would grab the rifle and sally forth. All too often the cunning dog would make off in time, slinking quickly round a Nissen hut or sagaciously putting some human beings between me and itself. But I wasn’t a bad shot and I got quite a few. I aimed at the head, because if you hit it that killed them dead. You couldn’t do anything with them, of course. You left them for the kites, which soon closed in. Pie-ards, however, continued to be a great nuisance in the camp on the unfenceable plain, upsetting swill-bins and even stealing the Arabs’ sorry little mid-day bites from wherever they had left them.
The insects were, as they say, something else. There were malarial mosquitoes, as there were everywhere in the Middle East. We all slept under mosquito nets and took mepacrine daily. But much more frightening were the scorpions. I understand now that no species of scorpion is actually lethal, but nevertheless the sting is dreadful. These particular scorpions were not very big, some two-and-a-half inches long, and coloured grey-yellow like the sand. The great fear was that you might inadvertently put your hand or foot on one while, for example, rummaging along a shelf or getting into bed. They liked a cranny among books or papers, and they liked blankets. All beds’ legs stood in individual pots of paraffin (made out of flimsies). Nevertheless, one night when getting into bed Driver Hills, a decent lad from Harpenden, felt a scorpion move near his foot. He whipped his leg out on the instant and it struck him only glancingly. He was in hospital for a week.
The akrebah were almost worse. They are the local centipedes. In colour they are dark red, sort of maroon. They are long - fully six inches - and, with the legs, nearly an inch broad. They have a forked tail which is a sting. Moreover, each foot (and there are many) is a sting in itself. If you find one on you and strike at it or brush it, it immediately drives each foot into you. They have to be cut out in hospital, and you are ill. They, like the scorpions, also dislike cleanliness and paraffin. All the floors were cleaned often with solutions of paraffin: to me the smell is the smell not only of Horris Wood but also of No. 2 Petrol Depot. What akrebah do is get up into the roof. All the roofs of the Nissen huts were of pitched corrugated iron. During the wet season the rain pounded and drummed on them all day and night. Every now and then an akrebah, making its way upside-down across the smooth corrugated iron, would lose its footing and fall. They could easily fall on a human beneath, and would then immediately dig in with their feet. I never saw it happen, but I’ve seen some near misses; frightening. They were very hard to kill. I once stamped one flat and threw it out of the door of my billet. In the morning it was still wriggling. After that I always used to cut them into pieces with a pair of scissors.
The flies were indistinguishable in appearance from our houseflies in England: but they bit. They would alight on your stockinged leg (we all wore shorts, of course) and you couldn’t feel them. A moment or two later you felt the ‘bite’, which was a little like that of an English horsefly, and went on irritating in a similar manner.
The hornets were magnificent creatures, like huge wasps. One morning I was riding back from Gaza on a motor-cycle when I suddenly felt a terrific sting at the interior top of my right thigh. I swerved but didn’t stop. I had got back to camp and was having a drink in the mess, sitting in a chair, when the hornet came crawling out of my shorts onto my knee: having stung once, however, it didn’t sting again. Perhaps it wasn’t used to the victim not dying.
The praying mantises still please me in memory. They were big - about four inches long - and green or brown in colour. I believe they could change colour to fit their surroundings. They couldn’t hurt you, and they weren’t afraid of you. If you sat one on the table it would remain still: but then, if you moved your finger from side to side in front of it, it would turn its head back and forth, watching it with its big eyes. They preyed all right: they preyed on moths. The moths were big, too, but I don’t know what kind. Along the front of the verandah of the officers’ mess Nissen hut was a trellis, up which grew flourishing, thick ipomea (morning glory). The mantises used to crouch just under the bell-flowers. When a moth, at evening, came to a flower, the mantis would grab it with its two forelegs, holding onto the foliage with its four others. The moth would flutter and struggle. I have seen yards of the creeper shaking in commotion as a battle was fought out. Sometimes the moth got away, but not as a rule.
One thing I have not forgotten is the orange grove near my billet. There are - or used to be — a great many of these groves in southern Palestine, the hinterland of Jaffa (Joppa), Tel-Aviv. In plan they were square, the plain offering no features in its flat expanse to dictate otherwise; and I suppose two acres or so in extent. Orange trees are very beautiful. They are about as big as small apple trees - or these ones were, anyway - and symmetrical, with glossy, dark-green foliage, very thick. They all seemed exactly the same size and shape, so that the grove had a formal, slightly unreal quality, as though some giant’s child had set out rows of beautiful toys from a box. In May, when they bloomed - greenish-white, waxy and multitudinous - the scent was more poignant and beautiful than words can describe. It was heavy and sweet, yet at the same time as fresh as running water. You never became tired of it. It is the most beautiful smell I know; more beautiful than frangipani, even. All the way down to Gaza stood these groves, and the spring air was laden with scent. I wonder, are they still there, nearly fifty years later? They must have known many vicissitudes during that time.
In Gaza one day, needing a leather belt, I bought a very ordinary, broad one, with a plain brass buckle, in an open-fronted, penthouse-flapped Arab shop. I hadn’t time to bargain.
‘K’dish?’ I asked the elderly Arab squatting on the stone floor.
I can see him now, looking up at me with a beady eye, not unfriendly; but here was a white zarbed, and they didn’t happen along every day.
‘Sabatash,’ (seventeen), he said softly, drawing out the syllables.
I gave it to him. Seventeen piastres were the equivalent of 3s. 6½d. in those days. (That would convert at 17p.) I still have the belt, so it hasn’t proved bad value.
During the summer there were almost daily trips for the soldiers to swim in the sea, about two miles away. The beach and the sea were as featureless as the plain, the level sand shelving evenly down into the shallow water for as far as could be seen in each direction.
There was a fair roll of surf, though, with quite an undertow as it slid back: you were helpless in it for the few seconds during which it dragged you. As a fairly experienced swimmer, knowing what I was doing, I used to enjoy this; but there was always the possibility of someone drawing in a lungful. The rule was that every swimming party had to be in the charge of an officer, and take with them a rope and a whistle. One afternoon our party had stopped off en route to pick up some other ranks from, a neighbouring unit. I was sitting in the cab with the driver. They came out and jumped into the back of the lorry, and the following dialogue took place between their senior N.C.O. and ours.
‘All set, then, Bill? Got the rope, ’ave yer?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Got the whistle?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Got the f—g officer?’
‘Yeah, ’e’s in the front.’
‘O.K., let’s go.’
While we were coming back from this trip, an unusual and rather bizarre little incident took place. We were coming through Majdal, the local village, when our lorry was brought to a halt by a commotion in the road in front. A male donkey, led on a rope by its Arab owner, had come to a halt more or less opposite a female being led the other way by an old, black-clad woman. The donkey refused to budge for any amount of beating. While Driver Porritt blew his horn and revved his engine impatiently, it became - and this was remarkable - a dangerous, savage animal in heat. It actually seemed to grow in size, frothing at the mouth and lashing out with its hooves. It shed its burden, kicked its owner into the ditch, stick and all, and rushed across the road, barging the shrieking old woman out of the way. The soldiers began cheering and giving a running commentary. The female was acquiescent, merely breathing heavily, hung-down muzzle drooling into the dust. With bared teeth, raging and frenzied, the donkey did what it wanted, taking not the least notice of the blows raining on it from the old woman’s stick as well as its owner’s. It didn’t take very long. When it had finished, it shrank and turned back into an ordinary, patient, ill-used little Arab donkey standing resignedly on the sand, while its owner whacked it a bit more for good measure. Yet I thought, as we drove on, that I detected a certain look of ‘Well, try and take that away, blast you!’
Most nights the sodden, be-winged major O.C. (for he had been in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War) and the other officers would set off for the distant open-air cinema, to see Abbott and Costello, or Alice Faye, while I contentedly sat at home as orderly officer. In Tel-Aviv I had been able to obtain all the other Jane Austens (except Persuasion). The night was quiet as few nights are today: no traffic, no wirelesses; only the light breeze and occasionally the low voice of an African sentry far out on the stacks.
Sometimes, having told the mess waiter more or less where I would be if anything happened, I would walk through the Nissen-hutted camp and out into the vast, unvarying plain. It was easy to stroll gently onwards, for the ground was as flat as can be imagined; never an undulation, never a bank, not even an occasional hollow. Away and away it stretched, eighty miles to Beer-Sheba, where I had never been. Could it, perhaps — legendary Beer-Sheba - be three shit-bins and two camels? It was refreshing to be in such solitude, in the scented night; but it was easy to feel homesick, too, alone under that great, unbroken hemisphere of sky. Yet precisely there lay the consolation - the stars. They were, over most of the sky at any rate, the same stars as at home, and I would look for Orion and Sirius, Leo and Gemini, Perseus and what Thomas Hardy calls ‘the great, gloomy square of Pegasus’. It reminded me of Robert Graves’s poem ‘Are you awake, Gemelli?’, about the soldier looking at the stars: except that that’s so cold, and this was warm enough to make you sweat, even standing still among the dry, crackling haulms (for the plain had little or no grass, only tough, foot-high stalks of flowering scrub).
Now and then I managed to go to Jerusalem, where I had made Arab friends. It was a beautiful city, quiet and jasmine-scented at night; and in the morning you would wake to hear from the street outside the approaching, stylized cry of the news-vendor. ‘Fal-as-teen Po-o-ost! Fal-as-teen Po-o-ost!’ I had a nice, kind-of girlfriend. I say ‘kind-of’ because our meetings were inevitably infrequent and nothing ever passed between us but a kiss. Her name was Georgette Khouri (‘Khouri’, I rather think, means ‘tailor’ — Taylor) and her father, who was dead, had been a don at Jerusalem University. I continued writing to her for about four years.
On Christmas Eve, 1942, I went out to Bethlehem, all empty; and it snowed! (I assure you it did.)
During May 1943, a private soldier called Ron Coomber and I made an expedition to Petra by way of Amman and Ma’an. In those days, of course, Petra was far, far away and utterly desolate. We saw what Burckhardt, the ‘modern’ discoverer, must have seen in 1812 - the silent, shard-strewn valley, the rose-red, maroon and sand-yellow carved façades, the split, pagoda-centred pediments, the flowering oleanders (though poisonous, they made good mattresses), the peacock-blue lizards on the red rock, the few scrawny Bedouin smoking camel-dung all night beside their glowing, camel-dung fire. (They seemed never to sleep.) There is a ruined Crusader castle high up on one of the hills. I wonder how the garrison used to feel in the thirteenth century?
All through this year I kept up my attempts to join Airborne Forces. It was fruitless: nobody wanted to know. I very much doubt whether my applications ever got beyond Pal. Base.
Meanwhile, Muriel Shaw (who, not hearing from me, had written to my father in England for my address) had come up from South Africa to take up a mysterious job in Cairo. We corresponded regularly and once she came to Jerusalem on leave, with her brother, who was also stationed in Egypt - at Heliopolis. So at last I met G. D. Shaw, a real, live, published Faber poet. I remember giving a dinner party, with the Shaws, some Arab friends and what wine the house could manage - several bottles of sparkling red burgundy. The visit was all too short; but it was reassuring, back on duty on the great Gromboolian plain, to know that at any rate as good a friend as Muriel was in Cairo.
All through 1943 the 8th Army continued their victorious advance: through Libya, through Tunisia; into Sicily, into Italy. And now British units were being returned to England for the Second Front. Palestine was emptying. We had a new O.C., a vain, coarse but good-natured fellow called Betton (not his name), who did no harm as long as you flattered him.
We received our orders to leave Al-Jiyah and entrain for Egypt. It so happened that Major Betton had to go into hospital for some sort of treatment; he would be rejoining us before embarkation for England. (The Med. was clear now, of course, and we would be sailing home direct, via Gibraltar.) With typical egocentricity and vulgarity, he devised a formal ‘handing over command’ parade (there isn’t one prescribed) in which he, of course, played the leading role. It was embarrassing: Salute: salute. Loud shout: ‘Captain MacLeod, I hand over the Unit - to YOU!’ Salute: salute. Mac. hadn’t been briefed on what he was supposed to do now, so he simply marched the blokes off. I expect it might have been past Betton at the salute, only he hadn’t thought of that.
Back on the railway; through Gaza, past Rafah, out of Palestine and into Egypt. My black cat, Ramadan, travelled with us. He was a great favourite with everybody and I was sorry to think that I should have to leave him in Egypt. In the event, Muriel ‘placed’ him with the Yacht Club at Gezira and I learned later that, as cats do, he had settled in quite happily and forgotten all about No. 2 Petrol Depot.
It was at the Base Depot in Egypt that I at last had some good luck mixed with the bad luck about my Airborne efforts. Army-wise, it makes a rather quaint little story. The Base Depot was under the command of a certain Colonel Sinclair, a white-moustached, Great War-medalled veteran who looked very like C. Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers. You knew exactly where you were with him: he was a soldier (like Marian Hayter’s father: all these have I observed from my youth up). I tried my airborne spiel on Colonel Sinclair, stressing the ‘young officer fretting for action’ stuff. It just so
happened that a day or two later, on his rounds of the camp, the Colonel dropped in on an Army Bureau of Current Affairs session (in plain English, a talk with the men about the news), which I was taking. I gave him the old ‘Party - party ‘shun!’ Smart salute. ‘No. 2 Petrol Depot, sir. A.B.C.A. session on Japan’s role in the war!’ ‘Right; carry on, Mr Adams, please,’ replied the Colonel, and stayed for the rest of the period, at the close of which he said a few complimentary words. He was clearly on my side.
The next day I managed to get a recreational day pass into Cairo. Once there, I telephoned Muriel and took her out to lunch. Over the coffee, I told her about Colonel Sinclair and my recent efforts.
Muriel looked very carefully all round and then, in effect, behind the curtains and under the carpet. Then she said ‘Richard, are you quite sure about this?’ I assured her that I was, and asked her why she asked.
‘Because that’s what we do.’
‘Who? Do what?’
Muriel came clean. Since her arrival in Egypt she had been a member of a high security organization. What they did was to train volunteers for liaison with the Resistance and for sabotage in Yugoslavia, including, of course, parachute training. Then they dropped them and kept in touch with them by radio.
‘But where do you come into it?’ I asked.
‘I do the high-grade cypher: teach it to the trainee agents and then keep in touch with them after they’ve gone off. Until they no longer come up on the wireless, that is. That’s why I asked whether you really wanted to do it.’
‘I still want to; although of course I realize that if you’re taken prisoner you get shot.’
‘’Bit more to it than that. They - talk to you first.’
I replied that the whole idea was very frightening, but nevertheless I’d still be glad of her help. Actually, this disclosure of Muriel’s had taken me unprepared. Hitherto, I had always thought in terms of joining Airborne Forces proper - the red berets. This sabotage cloak-and-dagger stuff I’d never contemplated. Yet here was the opportunity, and I felt I ought not, after all my posturing, to say ‘Well, thanks very much, but I don’t think I quite meant that.’